WASHINGTON — House Speaker John Boehner stood his ground yesterday, insisting that his
Republican House majority would not pass measures either to fund and reopen the entire federal
government or to increase the nation’s soon-to-be-breached borrowing limit without concessions from
President Barack Obama.

“There are not the votes in the House to pass a clean CR,” Boehner said on the ABC News program
This Week, referring to a continuing resolution that would provide stopgap funding and end
the government shutdown, now in its seventh day.

Some Democrats and some moderate Republicans in the House have said that together their votes
would be enough to pass a spending measure necessary to reopen the government with no conditions
attached.

Sen. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., a Senate Democratic leader who followed Boehner on ABC,
countered: “Let me issue him a friendly challenge. Put it on the floor Monday or Tuesday. I would
bet there are the votes to pass it.”

Similarly, on the subject of the looming deadline for Congress to increase the debt limit by
Oct. 17 to avert a government default, Boehner seemed to contradict news reports in recent days
that he had told Republicans privately that he ultimately would allow a vote to prevent a breach of
the debt limit.

He added, “I told the president, there’s no way we’re going to pass one. The votes are not in
the House to pass a clean debt limit. And the president is risking default by not having a
conversation with us.”

Boehner seemed to shift from demands that Obama agree to negotiations about defunding or
delaying his signature health-insurance law — a nonnegotiable condition, as the White House sees it
— to calling once again for deficit-reduction talks aimed at reducing spending for fast-growing
entitlement programs, chiefly Medicare and Medicaid.

“I’m not going to raise the debt limit without a serious conversation about dealing with
problems that are driving the debt up. It would be irresponsible of me to do this,” Boehner
said.

Obama has said he would negotiate long-term reductions to entitlement programs, including Social
Security, and he has proposed some steps, but he says he will support such actions only if
Republicans agree to raise additional revenue by closing tax loopholes for wealthy individuals and
some corporations.

But Boehner ruled that out. “We’re not raising taxes,” he said.

Given the apparent impasse, the speaker was asked, “When is this going to end?”

“If I knew, I would tell you,” he said.

Boehner acknowledged that in July he had gone to the Senate majority leader, Sen. Harry Reid,
D-Nev., and offered to have the House pass a “clean” spending measure. That proposal would have set
spending levels $70 billion below what Democrats wanted but would have had no controversial add-ons
related to the health-care law.

Democrats accepted, but now they say Boehner reneged when a faction of conservative House
Republicans rejected the strategy as capitulation on the health-insurance program.

The speaker explained, “I and my members decided the threat of Obamacare and what was happening
was so important that it was time for us to take a stand. And we took a stand.

“I thought the fight would be over the debt ceiling,” Boehner said. “But you know, working with
my members, they decided, ‘Well, let’s do it now.’ And the fact is, this fight was going to come,
one way or the other.”

For the Obama administration, the Treasury secretary, Jacob Lew, as the president’s chief
financial officer, appeared on four television shows yesterday to keep the pressure on House
Republicans.

Lew, speaking on CNN’s
State of the Union, reiterated the administration’s legal opinion that Obama cannot
constitutionally raise the debt ceiling by himself if Congress fails to act.

“There is no option that prevents us from being in default if we’re not paying our bills,” Lew
said.

Lew, who has told Congress that he has used his last “extraordinary measure” to manage federal
accounts in ways to buy time, reiterated that the government most likely would have about $30
billion available on Oct. 17.

“And $30 billion is a lot of money, but when you think about the cash flow of the government of
the United States, we have individual days when our negative or positive cash flow is $50 or $60
billion,” he said in the CNN interview. “So $30 billion is not a responsible amount of cash to run
the government on.”

On CNN and on
Fox News Sunday, Lew repeatedly dismissed questions as to why Obama would not negotiate
with House Republicans over the debt limit. Obama has said that increasing the borrowing authority
is a basic congressional responsibility under the Constitution, and not one for which lawmakers can
extract ransom.

“The president wants to negotiate,” Lew said. “Congress needs to do its job, and we then need to
negotiate.”